Economies of scale and increases in the availability of high-speed network connections have made it cheap and convenient for users to store digital content in a remote storage system instead of, or in addition to, local user device storage components. Besides simply storing users' data, such remote storage systems can offer various content management solutions to improve the user experience. The user experience may suffer, however, when content cannot be immediately synchronized between a user's local user device and the content management system.
Synchronizing content items may involve sending content items from a user device to the content management system, performing at least one management function on the content items at the content management system, and sending the content items and/or the output of the management functions to the user device (and additional user devices as appropriate). In circumstances in which the content items cannot be synchronized quickly, the user may not be able to take advantage of the management functionality provided by the content management system.